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http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/8675309.htm

clickey

True. My first year at Brown University some poor freshman girl ended up with 867-5309. She had it changed within the first month due to the inceasant stream of prank calls.

According to Snopes, it's really annoying to have that number. I feel for the guy "lucky" enough to win the bid for that one.

Here's the Clicky

When Art Fry, the inventor of Post-It notes, first attempted to pitch the innovation at 3-M he received a lukewarm response. He then distributed samples to some 3-M secretaries who quickly found new uses for them . It's now one of the 5 top-selling office products.

the history of the post-it note

First hiding A PENIS in one of their cartoons, and now this?

Why isn't the inventor of the internet, Al Gore, on the list?

OMFG, I'm sofaking sick of this stupid joke. First of all, it isn't even true. Secondly, anyone that keeps repeating it sounds like a moron. MORON.

I'd use mod points to bring the parent post down but no doubt some meta-moderator will be cluesless and mark my moderation as 'Unfair'. Oh, the irony.

online petitions are infamously poor at gaining any form of respect/notice. If you really care write a letter (remember those) to Fox (not Lucas). They are the ones who if they see a real interest in the product will put pressure / wads of money on /in front of Lucas to release the original trilogy.

Lies, lies, lies

Isn't this a Urban Legend?

This may, or may not, have been done.

This is similar to credit card scam that Bruce Schneier pointed out in his latest cryptogram.

You receive a telephone call from someone purporting to be from your credit card company. They claim to be from something like the security and fraud department, and question you about a fake purchase for some amount close to $500.


Hmm, while such a scam is vaguely plausible, the story has been doing the rounds with the same names and amounts that I think it safe to file it under Urban Legends

I received a copy circulated at work, identical in all respects with USD changed to GBP. Go figure.

Why exactly the original poster (Ungrounded Lightning [Rod]) gave the rather dubious example "(That's why it's so much harder to get tours of manufacturing plants these days. Kelloggs, for instance, used to give plant tours all the time. Was a regular tourist attraction. But they stopped them entirely after the Japanese cloned the rice crispies machine.)"

I mean, really. What grand process is there in making Rice Cripies (TM) is there to be learned by a picture of the machine involved? What process? I'm not saying that industrial espionage doesn't happen, but I am saying that this person (UG[R]) was essentially spouting random conjecture to support a weak anti-Japanese story that sounds very like an urban legend.

link

Nice to see that old urban legendenjoying a comeback. Heck, it may ever turn out to be true. If it does, I hope they have the foresight to actually designate it with this non-standard identifier.

You mean Kamchatka?

Maybe nothing was said because they were already jaded about giant explosions, along with Baba Yagas and other wierd happenings out there.

I do not wish to belittle your migranes (they are not pleasent, I know) but simply to point out that it is exceedingly unlikely that aspertame per se is the cause, or if it is the mechanism is not what is popularly claimed. If you are willing to make temporary sacrafice to help resolve the matter, you may want to see if there are any double blind studies being conducted on aspertame in which you could participate. The usual setup is that people who suspect they are sensitive to it are given (on two different days) a sealed pill that either contains aspertame or some inert substance. Neither they nor the person giving them the pills knows on which day they get which. The last I heard (late 1990's) they were still trying to find some greater-than-chance corelation.

If nothing else, it may help you learn more about what you need to avoid.

-- MarkusQ

Are these the same "Car Talk" guys that demonstrated knowledge of English bows and the fingers used?

"In April, Swedish furniture giant Ikea explains that a children's bunk bed called the Gutvik is named for "a tiny town in Sweden." Announcing that bit of etymology becomes necessary when Germans point out that, in their neck of the woods, the word sounds like a phrase that means "good f***." Ikea yanks the Gutvik from its catalogs in Germany."

I just wish they'd go back to the original formula. Delicious! No one would ever buy Pepsi again!

It like totally never happened. There is a Powergenitalia.com website, but it has nothing to do with the UK company Powergen.

Snopes has a better picture, along with links to video here.

Snopes to the rescue, again..

In 1980, five years before the introduction of New Coke, half the cane sugar in Coca-Cola had been replaced with high fructose corn syrup. By six months prior to New Coke's knocking the original Coca-Cola off the shelves, there was no cane sugar in American Coca-Cola. Whether they knew it or not, what consumers were drinking then was 100% sweetened by high fructose corn syrup.

Thats an urban legend.

Never happened.

This is almost entirely, if not entirely, a myth.

Personally what I'm most interested in are assistive agents. [...] maybe even subconciously. Think instant google searches based on something you're thinking about, augmenting your memory automatically.

I don't think this is such a good idea.

Even if you don't buy into the urban legend that men think about sex every seven seconds, you're still going to be generating a lot of Google queries about the same thing... over and over...

Or what if you're walking through the mall, and some teenybopper turns up Britney Spears, and you suddenly can't get "Oops, I Did It Again" out of your head because your implanted agent keeps pulling up the lyrics?

And if we're talking wi-fi links to remote systems, then you've got the ability to tap into another person's thoughts. I, for one, do not want the guy giving a presentation on the latest corporate buzzword to know that I'm mentally surfing the competitors' job postings.

And inadvertent cross-associations could be hazardous to your career.

Boss: Go online and find the price of widgets.
Thought 1: Online=Slashdot
Thought 2: Slashdot=troll
Thought 3: troll=goat
Thought 4: goat=!!!!
Boss: What the hell... you're fired!

No thanks, I'll do my surfing the old fashioned way, if you don't mind!

I rarely ever say this, but you are a pussy. Since when are you suppossed to let several thousand people die as two flaming towers collapse and just go on as if nothing had happened? You fight back. You kill every damned one of those sons of bitches. It really fuckin' irks me when the liberals here on slashdot have more hatred for Darl McBride than Osama bin Laden. At least Darl isn't a mass murderer.

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

How wonderful that there are morons who don't learn from history. You'd make a great fascist if you had enough influence to matter at all.

If you're stupid enough to think we attacked Iraq because of their (complete lack of any) role in 9/11 you are beyond help. Just go back to listening to Rush and watching Fox News and yelling "Sieg Heil!" whenever they show a photo of GWB.

Better that 100 times as many people die in future terrorist attacks (and if I'm one of them, so be it) than that we lose the freedoms that make America great. Of course, I expect the reality will be somewhere in the middle. More people will die, and some freedoms will be lost, but we won't hit either extreme.

I found out recently that they can't call it chicken anymore either.

Not like it hasn't happened before. http://www.snopes.com/disney/parks/deaths.htm

That's right, drink Coke and give your money to the Mormons....

yes, the Mormons bought Coke...

But honestly.. suggesting that people wouldn't buy a car named Nova because it meant "no go" is like suggesting Americans wouldn't buy an Electrolux vacuum because their slogan is/was "Nothing sucks with like an Electrolux".. kind of silly, really.

Like this sort of extreme measure? :-)

Yes. Instead let's discuss how full of crap you are and how you can come up with a list like that for anyone.

http://www.snopes.com/humor/jokes/thermometer.asp

This thing has been circulating forever.

Snopes is your friend.

I read in a Reader's Digest a long time ago about a lie detector a police department used...a metal collander wired to a copy machine that spat out "He's lying!" at the push of a button...,p> Not that I don't believe Reader's Digest *cough*, but I checked on snopes . There is no status on this one, it could be true or false. But the story dates pretty far back (late 1960's).

"These words did not originate with Abraham Lincoln, however -- they appear in none of his collected writings or speeches, and they did not surface until more than twenty years after his death (and were immediately denounced as a "bold, unflushing forgery" by John Nicolay, Lincoln's private secretary). This spurious Lincoln warning gained currency during the 1896 presidential election season (when economic policy, particularly the USA's adherence to the gold standard, was the major campaign issue), and ever since then it has been cited and quoted by innumerable journalists, clergymen, congressmen, and compilers of encyclopedias."

This is different, though. If they can *find* the guy to take him to court, they'll definitely win. The problem is that this spam is coming through hacked broadband users, so it's harder to trace back.

Of course, they could come at it through the registry of the .biz doman (I assume the one linked in the story is the one that's being spammed), but that's less certain to hold up in court. It could be joe job, after all.

E.T. (1982) - The game that sank Atari? 5,000,000 unsold copies?
How many other games have been so bad that 14 trucks worth of it were buried in a landfill?
Even when I was 10, playing it for 30 seconds at a dept store, I knew it sucked ass.

Actually, it ISN'T:

"After the Apollo 11 astronauts returned to Earth, Armstrong corrected his mistake (stating that he had been "misquoted"), and NASA obligingly provided the cover story that "static" had obscured the missing word"

"Even The New York Times didn't buy the "static" explanation (hence the "Whatever the reason . . ." introductory phrase in the final sentence of their article), and little detective work is necessary to reveal it as a face-saving fabrication: NASA's own recording of Armstrong's transmission from the lunar surface reveals that his words are clearly audible over the background static; that the word "man" follows immediately on the heels of "for," with no gap between them into which Armstrong could conceivably have inserted the word "a"; and that Armstrong pauses noticeably after the second occurrence of "one," as he realizes he's flubbed his line and hesitates momentarily before completing it. "

read

for yourself

This is an urban legend, and a false one at that. Although the coriolis force is very real, it is much too small to influence the way toilets flush.

This is an older story explaining why we have such limitations in our railroad system (found many different places an versions on the internet, but is very true!). [...snip]

One of the places on the internet this story appears is here... and yet it's still "very true"?

ERROR ERROR DOES NOT COMPUTE

parent's clickable link

The android isn't named after "I Love Lucy," it's named after Lucy, a 40% complete hominid skeleton a bit older than 3 million years found by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in Ethiopia in 1974.

Lucy, as the above link mentions, was named becuase the paleontologists were listening to the Beatles "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" over and over again and eventually someone called skeleton Lucy.

"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" apparently was named after the title of a painting by Julian Lennon, the then-4-year-old son of John Lennon, not LSD.

If you don't believe John Lennon's explanations, then the most popular position was that it was named after the hallucinogenic drug LSD. LSD is the abbreviation for Lyserg-saure-diathylamid, or to us English speakers lysergic acid N,N-diethylamide. First synthesized by Albert Hofmann in 1938, the "interesting" properties were discovered by the same in 1943.

Claim: NASA spent millions of dollars developing an "astronaut pen" which would work in outer space while the Soviets solved the same problem by simply using pencils.
Status: False.

No, the body will flush it through normal processes, just like gum doesn't sit in the body for years and years. Your digestive system is a pipe; there's nowhere for something to just "hang out" for years.

This is true and it's easy to prove: A penny is much larger, completely indigestable, and will invariably come out. The only danger of eating a single penny is that some part of the "pipe" may be too small to accomodate it, in which case it could be fatal as it clogs the whole system up. As styrofoam has much more give, this does not apply. If you can handle a penny, you can handle syrofoam.

Shit-eating is not just "not fun", it's actively and supremely dangerous, with a good possibility of death without (and possibly with) medical attention. Among other nasty organisms, it tends to harbor e coli in dangerous quantities.

This is why you have not seen a "shit eating" contest on "Fear Factor"; it's not safe at all.

I doubt Styrofoam would cause much more then mild discomfort, if that. Shit stands a good chance to kill you. I know which I'd choose... Styrofoam would be a better bet, by a long shot.

"Natural" is a meaningless term in determining toxicity; botulism toxin is natural, cobra venom is natural, all toxic houseplants are natural, for that matter e coli and ebola are 100% all natural too. I'd rather eat 100 grams 100% artificial Vitamin C then 100 grams of botulism toxin.

Did you people know that there actually exists a town called "Fucking" in Austria? I'm considering moving there.

Check it out.

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."

First, the "frog in boiling water" is an urban legend

Second, I think the best place to fix that business plan is at step 1. Don't get a CIS degree. Find something else useful to do, and you will make money at it. I don't see the auto mechanics screaming because people are shipping their cars to India to get them fixed. I don't see dentists up in arms because Americans are flying to Dehli for a root canal. The tech boom is over. It's not coming back. Deal with it. There are other aspects to the economy besides IT and manufacturing.

That's a myth. Pens don't rely on gravity to work, they are all about surface tension. Both nasa and the soviets used both pencils and pens, and the "space pen" was developed by a pen company with no relationship with nasa.

A quick google search found this